Twitter has thought about holding bitcoin, not decided yet: CNBC

(Reuters) - Twitter Inc has thought about whether to hold bitcoin on its balance sheet, but has not made any changes yet, the social media platform’s chief financial officer, Ned Segal, told CNBC on Wednesday.

In an interview with CNBC, Segal said Twitter had considered how it might pay vendors or employees using bitcoin, should they ask to transact using the virtual currency.

“We might consider whether we would be transferring dollars to bitcoin at the time of the transaction or if we wanted bitcoin on our balance sheet ready to complete that transaction,” Segal said.

Segal’s comments come a couple of days after billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk’s Tesla Inc revealed the automaker had bought $1.5 billion of the cryptocurrency and would soon accept it as a form of payment for cars, sending the cryptocurrency shooting higher.

On General Motors Co’s earnings call on Wednesday, Chief Executive Mary Barra, responding to a question about accepting bitcoin as payment for vehicles, said, “This is something we’ll monitor and we’ll evaluate. If there’s strong customer demand for it in the future, there’s nothing that precludes us from doing that.”

But unlike Musk, Barra said “We don’t have any plans to invest in bitcoin. Full stop there.”

Shares of Twitter were up 11% on Tuesday after the company beat Wall Street targets for quarterly sales and profit and followed its social media peers to forecast a strong start to 2021 as ad spending rebounds from rock bottom.

Twitter top boss Jack Dorsey, who is also the chief executive of payments firm Square Inc, is a known bitcoin enthusiast and has said he believes the internet will have its own native currency.

Square in October said it had purchased about 4,709 bitcoins at an aggregate purchase price of $50 million.

Reporting by Subrat Patnaik in Bengaluru and Anna Irrera in London; Editing by Ramakrishnan M. and Jonathan Oatis

“That’s right, an electronic currency was used to purchase a fully electric vehicle,” the dealership’s 2013 blog post reads.

However, the price of that bitcoin has appreciated 4,100% since the 2013 transaction. The digital asset broke above $43,000 to a high of $47,700 after the electric vehicle giant announced a $1.5 billion purchase in an SEC filing earlier this week.

As of press time, the value of the bitcoin used to buy the 2013 Tesla would be over $4.1 million.

The purchase was not necessarily the first of its kind concerning electric vehicles (although in terms of Tesla it seems to be). In 2013, a Toyota Prius was purchased for 1,000 BTC by one early bitcoin investor who lived off the digital currency.

Sadly, it seems Lamborghini Newport Beach did not hodl its bitcoin stash. Although more customers came forward after the news, the dealership apparently flipped the bitcoin for dollars using payment processor BitPay, CNN reported at time.

Lamborghini Newport Beach did not return questions for comment when reached by phone.

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Bitcoin’s recent surge has brought Laszlo Hanyecz, the man behind the infamous “Bitcoin Pizza,” into the limelight this week. He told Bloomberg that he was “not too interested in Tesla” and advocated for bitcoin holders to not sell their digital currency.